U.S. Courts to Try Contractors for Torture at Abu Ghraib
by Pratap Chatterjee, CorpWatch BlogMay 17th, 2012Two U.S. companies can be prosecuted for the alleged role of their employees in torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, a U.S. federal court ruled last week. The companies are CACI of Arlington, Virginia, which provided the interrogators at the prison, and L-3/Titan of New York city, which provided translators at the same location.

Cashing in on Terrorismby Anna Feigenbaum, CorpWatch BlogApril 24th, 2012"Is Rioting a Form of Urban Terrorism?" The headline for a press release was a provocative introduction to the annual Counter Terror Expo in Olympia, London, which opens this week. (April 25 & 26) Eight thousand visitors are expected to descend on 400 exhibitions of counter-terrorism technologies and services.

Lockheed, General Dynamics Face UK Bank Boycott Over Cluster Bombsby Pratap Chatterjee, CorpWatch BlogApril 10th, 2012Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics of the U.S. face divestment from major UK banks, for manufacturing cluster bombs. The Guardian newspaper has exclusively reported that Aviva, the UK’s largest insurance company; Scottish Widows (part of the Lloyds Banking Group) and the Co-op Bank will sell shares in these companies, following a similar move by the Royal Bank of Scotland last year.

Militarizing the Middle East: Arms Shipments Continue Despite Abusesby Pratap Chatterjee, CorpWatch BlogMarch 21st, 2012The U.S. sends weapons to Egypt, Russia sends weapons to to Syria and the European Union to Saudi Arabia, according to new reports from Amnesty and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. This is despite conclusive evidence that these weapons are being used for human rights abuse.

State of Surveillanceby Pratap Chatterjee, CorpWatch/The Bureau of Investigative JournalismDecember 1st, 2011A new cache of Wikileaks documents on the secretive surveillance industry uncovers 160 companies in 25 countries that make $5 billion a year selling sophisticated surveillance technology to security authorities around the world to secretly carry out mass surveillance of people via their phones and computers.

SYRIA: US technology used to censor the Internet in Syriaby Pratap Chatterjee, The Bureau of Investigative JournalismOctober 23rd, 2011Technology from a major Silicon Valley company, Blue Coat, is being used by the Syrian government to censor the Internet and monitor dissidents, according to activists. The equipment can be used to monitor users and block access to certain websites, such as social networking applications like Facebook and internet phone sites like Skype, which were key to the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia